Selfie creep: The latest photojournalism crutch

"Selfie" was Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year in 2013, but they're not going anywhere. The practice keeps showing up in my photography this past year.

Not that I'm taking a lot of selfies. The only one I remember was with the world's largest cow (the pride of northwestern Illinois), and that was at the insistence of Blosom's owner.

Tribune photojournalist Nancy Stone and I noticed this week how often we're seeing photos of people taking photos of themselves. And I'm guilty, too–a quick search of my desktop found four such offenders. There were probably dozens more this year I've resisted the temptation to shoot or file.

It makes sense why we shoot them. The basic formula for a daily assignment is to have an expressive face and a background that gives context to the event. Generally, faces are looking at said scene, so it's not until the person turns around that the elements line up. A selfie makes this easy.

They're not always terrible images, but they're so ubiquitous it already feels cliche. The worst culprits generally have huge outstretched arms and hands distorted by a wide-angle lens in the foreground. They remind us that everyone is recording their own visual memories, which is great, but in the most camera-conscious way possible.

My 2015 resolution is to avoid the selfie temptation ... or at least put them all in a folder to laugh at later.